eBay India Shuts Shop; Other Popular Web Platforms That Vanished Without a Trace

In this ever changing digital world, nothing is permanent. E-retailers, social media sites and other content hosting sites need to change rapidly to keep in pace with the current trends. It has become imperative to constantly update a platform, or it does tend to perish in no time. eBay India, which is owned by Flipkart, is ending its operations in India. The ecommerce site will not take any fresh orders from today.

Those who have already ordered products on eBay will receive them as items bought on the site are protected under eBay Guarantee. Refunds initiated too will be processed shortly, and 30 August 2018 will be the last date for buyers to raise eBay Guarantee claims for any transactions done so far, says eBay. Flipkart is expected to launch an improved version of the platform.

In fact, it is not just eBay that has shut shop. Popular and happening websites have vanished without a trace as they could not keep pace with changing trends, and new and improved platforms took over the market. This also outlines the need for currently popular ecommerce and social media sites to understand the importance of innovation. Let us now take a look at some sites that were popular in their time, but are now no longer around.

Orkut

When talking about social media, Orkut was probably one of the first sites that became popular and struck a chord with students, and professionals alike. Since it had millions of users, Orkut also relied on advertising revenue. What started as a closed community, which one could only enter through invites, soon opened its doors to everybody all over the world. However, the social media platform started facing security issues and in India, it was being used to start online ‘hate campaigns’. Finally on 30 June 2014, Google announced that it would be closing Orkut.

iTunes Ping

iTunes Ping was a music-oriented social networking and recommender system service developed and operated by Apple. Launched on 1 September 2010, the service had one million active users around the world within 48 hours of its launch. Nonetheless, iTunes was reportedly flooded by spam soon after it was launched. Fraudsters would create iTunes profile and post links to online scams like ones promising ‘free iPhones’ or ‘free iPads’ in exchange for filling out online surveys. Two years after its launch, Apple closed the service and introduced iTunes with Facebook and Twitter integration.

Megaupload

Megaulpoad was a popular online service, offering file storage and viewing, which operated for nearly seven years. The company’s web services included Megaupload - a one-click hosting service, Megapix - image hosting service, Megavideo and Megalive -  video hosting services, and Megabox - a music hosting service. Megaulpoad also had advertisement and financial services under Megaclick, Megafund, Megakey and Megapay. Although the platform was hugely popular, on 19 January 2012, the United States Department of Justice seized the domain names and closed down the sites associated with Megaupload. The owner Kim Dotcom was arrested and indicted for copyright infringement. This led to the Hacktivist group ‘Anonymous’ organizing DoS (denial-of-service) attacks on several  US government websites, in protest of this move. Megaupload was re-launched as ‘Mega’ under the domain name mega.co.nz.

Yahoo! Messenger

Yahoo Messenger was a free of charge, advertisement-supported instant messaging client and associated protocol. Yahoo Messenger could be accessed using a ‘Yahoo ID’, which also allowed access to other Yahoo services like Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo Messenger also allowed users to access public chat rooms. On 14 December 2012 Marissa Mayer, then President and CEO of Yahoo, shut down all public chat rooms on Yahoo Messenger as part of a series of features that were being changed. Yahoo Messenger was shut down entirely on 17 July 2018. The app is now redirecting users to sign up for group messaging app Squirrel.

Google Buzz

Developed by Google, this social networking, microblogging and messaging tool could be integrated into Gmail. Users had the choice to share - links, photos, videos, status messages and comments - either publicly or privately to a group of friends. However, the service was strongly criticized for being inefficient in handling users’ privacy and was discontinued on 14 October 2011.